The Way of the Spirit

THE WAY OF THE SPIRIT

Edith thought a while, then she took a piece of paper and wrote upon it with a pencil:

“I agree. “Edith.

“P. S. – I enclose a letter which I have for you. He wrote it shortly before he died. Also, there are some from the lawyers.” “After all,” she reflected to herself, as she saw the runner depart swiftly, carrying her packet on the top of a cleft stick, “it will give me a little time to look round in peace. Rupert is right, it is no use wrangling. Moreover, he and that woman are

masters here, and I must obey.”

Within an hour the runner returned again, bearing another note from Mea, which, in very queer English, asked them both to honour them with their company at the midday meal. They went, and on the way met Dick, who had received a similar invitation. On arriving at the town, they found Rupert seated beneath the verandah of his house, and squatted upon the ground around him a considerable number of people, all of them suffering from various complaints, together with some women who held sick children in their arms. He bowed to them, and called out in a cheerful voice:

“Forgive me for a little while. I have nearly finished my morning’s doctoring, and perhaps you had better stand back, for some of these ailments are infectious.”

Edith and Dick took the hint at once, riding their animals into the shade of a tree a little way off. Not so Tabitha. Descending from her donkey with a bump, she marched straight to Rupert and shook his hand. Two minutes later they per-

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ceived that she was helping him to bandage wounds and dispense medicines.

“How she can!” exclaimed Edith, “and the worst of it is she is sure to bring some filthy disease back with her. Just think of Rupert taking to doctoring all those horrid people!”

“They say he is uncommonly clever at it,” answered Dick, “and will ride for miles to see a sick person. Perhaps that is why they are so fond of him.”

“Why don’t you go to help him?” asked Edith. “You studied medicine for two years before you went to the Bar.”

“Thanks,” he answered, “I think it is pleasanter sitting under this tree with you. At present I am not a candidate for popular affection, so I don’t see why I should take any risks.”

“Rupert doesn’t mind risks,” said Edith.

“No,” he said, “one of his characteristics always was to like what is disagreeable and dangerous. In that fact lies your best chance, Edith. He may even make up his mind to abandon an existence which seems to suit him exactly and return to the joys of civilisation.”

“You are even ruder than usual, Dick,” she said. “Why did you come here at all? We never asked you.”

“You cannot pretend, Edith, that gentleness has been your prevailing note of late. For the rest, considering that on the results of this inquiry depended whether I should be one of the richest men in England or a beggar, it is not strange that I came to look after my own interests,” he added bitterly.

“Well, you know now,” she answered, “so why don’t you go away? Rupert is alive, therefore the property is his, not yours.”

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“Quite so; but even Rupert is not immortal. He might contract one of those sicknesses, for instance.”

“No such luck for you, Dick,” she said, with a laugh; “he is too much accustomed to them, you won’t get rid of him like that.”

“I admit it is improbable, for he looks singularly healthy, does he not? But who knows? At any rate, he is a good-natured fellow; I may be able to come to some terms with him. Also,” he added, in another voice, “please understand once and for all that I am going to see this play out, whatever you or anybody else may say or do. I was in at the beginning, and I mean to be in at the death.”

Edith shrugged her shoulders, turning away, for there was a very unpleasant look upon Dick’s face, and just at that moment they saw Rupert, who had washed his hands and changed his robe, riding towards them upon a white mule by the side of which walked Tabitha. He could not take off his hat because he wore a keffieh, but he saluted Edith by placing his fingers upon his forehead, and then stretched out his hand to her and to Dick.

“Forgive my dismounting, Edith,” he said, in a pleasant voice, “but you remember what a dreadful cripple I am, and I haven’t been able to grow a new foot, or even to get an artificial one here. I did send for the article, but it must have been made for a lady; at any rate, it was three sizes too small, and now adorns a black old beggar woman.”

Edith laughed; somehow the thought of Rupert’s mutilated state no longer filled her with horror.

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CHAPTER XXIII

THE WHEEL TURNS

This meal in Mea’s house proved to be the beginning of a very curious existence for the four persons chiefly concerned in our history. Every day, or almost every day, they met, and the solemn farce was carried on. Mea and Rupert played their parts of courteous hosts, Edith and Dick those of obliged and interested guests, while Tabitha watched them all with her quiet eyes and wondered what would befall when the truce came to an end. Soon she and Mea were very good friends, so good that from time to time the latter would even lift a corner of the veil of Eastern imperturbability which hid her heart, and suffer her to guess what pain and terrors racked her. Only of these matters they did not speak; not to do so was a part of the general conspiracy of silence.

Edith was with Rupert as often as possible; she even took long rides which she hated, in order to share his company, whilst with a feverish earnestness he discoursed to her of all things in heaven and earth, except those things which leapt to the lips of both of them. She watched him at his work, and learned to understand how great that work was and how well it had been done. She perceived that he was adored by all, from

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Mea herself down to the little children that could hardly walk, and began to comprehend the qualities which made him thus universally beloved. More – the truth may as well be told at once – now, for the first time in her life, they produced a deep impression upon her.

At last Edith began to fall in love with, or if that is too strong a term, at any rate really to admire her husband, not his nature only, but his outward self as well, that self which to her had once seemed so hateful, especially when she compared him with another man. Now, by some strange turn of the wheel of her instincts, it was that other man who was hateful, from whom she shrank as once she had shrunk from Rupert, taking infinite pains to avoid his company, and still more the tendernesses which he occasionally tried to proffer; he who also had grown very jealous. The fact of Mea’s obvious adoration of Rupert may, of course, in the case of the character like Edith’s, have had much to do with this moral and physical volte-face, but it was by no means its only cause. Retribution had fallen upon her; the hand of Fate had pressed her down before this man’s feet.

Yet the worst of it was that she made no real progress with him. Rupert was most courteous and polite, very charming indeed, but she felt that all these things were an armour which she could not pierce, that as he had once said, his nature and his spirit rose in repugnance against her. Twice or thrice she took some opportunity to touch him, only to become aware that he shrank from her, not with the quick movement of a man who desires to avoid being betrayed into feeling, or led into temptation, but because of an unconquerable innate distaste – quite

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a different thing. She remembered his dreadful words of divorce, how he had said that henceforth he hated her, and that even should she in the future swear that she loved him, he would not lay a finger-tip upon her. Why should he indeed when another woman, more faithful, more spiritual – and yes, she must admit it, more lovely, was the companion of his every waking thought and hour.

See Edith now after she has spent fourteen days in her husband’s company. She is tired with the long ride she has taken in the hot sun just to be with him, feigning an interest in things which she did not understand, about the propagation of date-palms, for instance, as though she cared anything whether they grew from seeds or offshoots. Tired, too, with her long, unceasing effort to show him her best side, to look cool and attractive in that heat and mounted on a skittish horse which frightened her. (How, she wondered, did Mea contrive never to seem hot or to lose her dignity, and why did her hair always remain so crisp and unruffled, even beneath her white head-dress?) Annoyed also by Dick, who had accompanied her home and showed his ever-growing jealousy in a most unpleasant fashion, firing arrow after arrow of his coarse sarcasm at her, even reminding her of that afternoon years ago when her husband was supposed to be dead and she became engaged to him. She had scarcely replied; it did not seem worth while, only in her heart she vowed that should she ever have an opportunity, she would be rid of Dick once and for all. Yes, she did not care what he might say or what letters he threatened to publish, she would face it out and have done with him, as she wished that she had found courage to do long ago.

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Now she was in her own room, and stretched face downwards upon her angarib or native bedstead, she sobbed in the bitterness of her soul. All her wiles, all her charm could not prevail against that small but royal-looking Eastern woman with the ready wit, the single aim, the mysterious face and the eyes like Fate, who had risen up against her and taken with gratitude the man whom she had once rejected, contented if only she might own his heart. Had it been otherwise, quarrels might have arisen, or he might have wearied of her; but that was the worst of it, where there was no marriage there could be no wearying. Always she stretched before him a garden of Eden, a paradise from which he was turned back by the flame-sworded angels of his own strict righteousness and oath. And into the rival garden which she, Edith, had to offer, whereof the gates, once so locked and barred, now stood wide, he showed no wish to wander.

What would be the end of it, when, at the expiration of the month again she faced that alien multitude with their stony, contemptuous eyes? Oh! surely then she would hear that he had taken counsel with himself and that conscience of his; that he found no law which forced him to return to a woman who had spurned him; that he offered her his title and his wealth and wished her well, but that himself he would bide where he was and discuss philosophy, and doubtless other things, with his lady Tama, the beautiful and perfect.

It was too much. Edith gave way to grief uncontrolled, her sobs echoed in the empty room so loudly that Tabitha heard them through the thin partition wall and came in to see what was the matter.

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“Are you ill?” she asked.

Edith in her night-dress sat up on the angarib, her face wet with tears, her hair falling about her shoulders.

“I suppose so,” she answered. “At least I am unhappy, which is the same thing.”

“What about? Has that Dick – “

“Oh! never mind Dick; I am tired of Dick.” “What is it, then? Rupert?”

“Yes, of course. Are you blind, Tabitha?”

“Ach! I think I see as far as most. But why should you weep over Rupert so loudly that I can hear you through a wall? He is very kind to you.”

“Kind, kind, kind!” answered Edith, increasing her emphasis upon each repetition of the word. “Yes, he is kind as he would be to any troublesome woman who had wandered here. I do not want his kindness.”

“What, then, do you want? His anger?” “No; I want – his love.”

“You can’t buy that for less than nothing, especially when there is another merchant in the market,” remarked Tabitha thoughtfully.

“I don’t know what you call for less than nothing, Tabitha. Is everything that I have to give less than nothing?”

“Mein Gott! I see. You do mean that you are in love with him yourself?”

“Yes, I suppose that is what I mean. At any rate, he is my husband – I have a right to him.”

Again Lady Devene reflected, then said:

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“I always did wonder if it would end so. If you can come to care, pity it was not long ago. Why have you put it off so long, Edith? Now I think that perhaps it will be too late. What’s your English proverb? – one day behind the fair.”

“If that is all you have to say, you might have stopped in your room,” answered Edith, between her sobs.

“Himmel! what more can I say than the truth? I did not cook this pudding, Edith. You cook it, and you must eat it. What is the good to cry out that it is nasty now. Still I am sorry for you, my poor Edith, who find out that if you throw enough stones into the air, sometimes one fall upon your head.”

“Go away, please,” said Edith; “I don’t want to be pitied, and I don’t want to be lectured. Leave me alone to eat what you call my pudding.”

“Very well,” answered Tabitha quietly; “but you take my advice, you ask God to make it sweeter, which you always forget to do.”

“I have forgotten too long, I am afraid,” said Edith, throwing herself down again on the angarib and turning her face to the wall.

There were other sore hearts in Tama that night. For instance, Rupert could not fail to see, if not all, at any rate a great deal of what was passing in his wife’s mind. He understood that she was earnestly sorry for what she had done and heartily wished it undone. He was sure, also, from his knowledge of their previous close relations, from the by no means obscure hints that she gave him, and from what he observed of them when they were together, that throughout she had acted under

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